‘Remote view­ing led to Saddam’s cap­ture’?

ISRAEL. It was a clair­voy­ant using remote view­ing tech­niques who was respon­si­ble for lead­ing US com­man­dos to Sad­dam Hussein’s hid­ing place in Iraq three years ago.

That’s the claim made by famous spoon-bender Uri Geller in an inter­view with a Reuters news agency cor­re­spon­dent in Her­zliya, Israel, the day after Hus­sein was sen­tenced to death by an Iraqi court for crimes against humanity.

“You remem­ber when they found Sad­dam Hus­sein in Iraq? A sol­dier walked over to a rock, lifted it and then found a trap-door and found him in there,” Geller recalled.

“Well, I know that that sol­dier walked over to that rock because he got infor­ma­tion from a ‘remote viewer’ from the United States.”

Geller, who claims he worked for the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency dur­ing the Cold War, said his infor­ma­tion came from a high-level source involved in Amer­i­can para­nor­mal programmes.

At the time of his cap­ture, US com­man­ders said a source close to Hus­sein had given him up under inter­ro­ga­tion. A US mil­i­tary spokesman in Iraq had no imme­di­ate com­ment on Geller’s claim.

A Brazil­ian psy­chic had pre­vi­ously claimed the $25 mil­lion bounty offered for Saddam’s cap­ture, say­ing he had described the hid­ing place in let­ters to the US gov­ern­ment. Uri Geller is cur­rently in Israel in con­nec­tion with a real­ity TV show.

ParanormalReview.com’s edi­tor, Roy Stem­man, recently sug­gested that Geller him­self may have been the uniden­ti­fied remote viewer who was brought in by the Israeli Army to help locate two kid­napped soldiers.

Since research into remote view­ing – the abil­ity to use the mind to “see” events that are hap­pen­ing far away – has been financed by the US mil­i­tary in the past, it is likely that there is a grain of truth in Geller’s claim. Indeed, it would be sur­pris­ing if the US wasn’t exper­i­ment­ing with remote view­ing tech­niques back in 2003, along­side con­ven­tional inves­ti­ga­tion meth­ods, in their hunt for Sad­dam Hussein.

In fact, a remote view­ing exper­i­ment con­ducted by US para­psy­chol­o­gist Stephan A. Schwartz (left), an inter­na­tion­ally acknowl­edged expert on the sub­ject, illus­trates how accu­rate the tech­nique can be, par­tic­u­lar if the results are a con­sen­sus view taken from numer­ous “viewers”.

The exper­i­ment, con­ducted on 3 Novem­ber 2003, sug­gested that Sad­dam Hus­sein would be found crouch­ing in a sub­ter­ranean room or cave, beneath an ordinary-looking house on the out­skirts of a small vil­lage near Tikrit, that is reached by a tun­nel. And the for­mer leader, they said, would look like a home­less per­son, with a ratty salt-and-pepper beard. He would have a gun and some money but would not put up any resistance.

All of these state­ments, sub­se­quently, were scored as hits. And the draw­ings showed strik­ing sim­i­lar­i­ties with the dia­grams and related evi­dence pre­sented by the US mil­i­tary when they announced Saddam’s cap­ture (see Schwartz’s com­par­i­son below).

Four days after the exper­i­ment, the Pen­ta­gon announced that a spe­cial “covert com­mando force to hunt Sad­dam Hus­sein” had been formed. He was cap­tured more than five weeks later, on 16 December.

The ARE’s mag­a­zine Ven­ture Inward (March/April 2004) car­ried a news story about the sem­i­nar in which Stephan Schwartz empha­sised it was just an exper­i­ment, adding:

“We had no access to mil­i­tary forces and, with­out that, there is no way to oper­a­tionalise such infor­ma­tion. Peo­ple often tar­get that remote view­ing is just a piece of a com­plex puz­zle, not some magic bul­let that alone solves the problem.

“How­ever, it is dif­fi­cult to resist the con­clu­sion that, had we been able to get it to some­one in the com­mand struc­ture who was pre­pared to act on it, this data might have been quite useful.”

Did Uri Geller hear about this exper­i­ment and mis­in­ter­pret it? Or does he have infor­ma­tion that sug­gests some­one did have access to the com­mand struct and it did act on it? Though Geller pro­vides no evi­dence, the Stephan A. Schwartz exper­i­ment ddemon­strates that such a pos­si­bil­ity is feasible.

Per­haps, one day, the Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act will reveal the full story.

Read the full arti­cle here…